Is actually 20% stronger than Barrier, probably because it doesn't prevent damage.

T&C

Has no actual counterpart.

savage defense

Is stronger against melee swings, but weaker against "combos".

comparable to seal of insight

This would be "analogous" to LotP, I agree.

death strike

Silly comparison to draw and you know it. This accomplishes nothing other than to confuse the issue. Just stop. There's a reason Deathknights have incredibly strong self healing.

monk level 30 talents/gift of the ox

I agree this would again be the "analogous" ability to LotP. However FR would be similar to Guard, and of those two FR is the stronger.

Damage prevention is shoddy - T&C is just not enough when compared to spells like AMS, diffuse magic, guard, sotr/divine shield, shield barrier, etc. Other tanks can AM large predictable hits, druids will take them to the face, often with no armor protection, or use their major/minor survival cds.

Sigh.

AMS has always been the outlier and should not be compared to anything anyone else has. We learned that back in Dragon Soul. The "often with no armor protection" comment is also mostly bogus, since the only one of those that happens this tier is Snapping Bite which conveniently works well with FR and the shield mechanic available on Heroic.

What you are trying to say here (and what I partially agree with), is that the model of mitigating the large "combos" and taking more damage from melee swings doesn't really work evenly across all tank classes. The combos are the only really dangerous part of tanking this tier, and if you can survive those the melee swings are kinda meh. That or regular melee swings just aren't dangerous enough by themselves.

What if T&C worked as an actual physical damage absorption on the boss? Of course it would have to be against single-target damage only, but that would eliminate several things:

1) Give us a tool against combos.
2) Prevent T&C from being wasted, ever.
3) Increase the value of Haste.

Of course I doubt the tech to do this actually exists, but who knows.

Off-healing: Paladins, monks, and dks do a decent amount of healing to the raid, roughly one third as much as an actual healer. NV can't compare, and warriors don't have anything of note.

Of those, DKs goes a considerable amount to overheal, and BH is (rightly) getting nerfed. Will probably be hit even harder. I do like Black Ox statue, and I wish LotP functioned in a similar manner.

I hate to point it out, but you didn't mention HotW anywhere :\

In any case I will say that you can't ask for the moon & stars, otherwise you will be pretty much ignored. As I've stated previously Blizzard is committed to making sure all the tanks are on an equal footing. I would like to see T&C made smarter, and some of the spells we never use nor care about anymore - like Innervate and LotP - be looked at.

One of the things everyone has to remember is that we have to entertain the possibility we're just doing it wrong when it comes to heroic raiding (moreso 25m than 10m).

In any case I will say that you can't ask for the moon & stars, otherwise you will be pretty much ignored. As I've stated previously Blizzard is committed to making sure all the tanks are on an equal footing. I would like to see T&C made smarter, and some of the spells we never use nor care about anymore - like Innervate and LotP - be looked at.

One of the things everyone has to remember is that we have to entertain the possibility we're just doing it wrong when it comes to heroic raiding (moreso 25m than 10m).

Just wanted to touch a little on T&C, and perhaps some of the other utility items at play.

I almost want to think that Blizz intended T&C for two purposes: to have Guardians hit Maul more often and to help mitigate "special attack + auto-attack" combo damage. However, in order to use T&C on demand, we need a hefty amount of reliable rage generation and haste to proc it, some of which I'm personally starting to see (raid buffed I'm about 24% haste and 51% crit, hit/exp(hard) capped now with hybrid gemming). While I don't expect every druid to have more rage than they know what to do with, using T&C whenever you wish requires quite a bit of rage.

I'd like to use Megaera as an example, heroic or normal since they barely differ for tanks, as it exemplifies how rage generation can make a huge difference in how a Guardian deals with incoming damage using T&C. My standard way of tanking a head is to use SD once upon picking up the head and then using SD two times in between breaths... once the SD criteria is met, all my rage is used to apply T&C to the head (pretty much Maul on CD until a breath), all while having enough rage to FR heal myself up after every breath. Now, this is after I've obtained some gear in ToT... before all the upgrades I'd struggle to even keep SD up while healing myself up with FR after every breath; T&C was just completely out of the question unless I got lucky with rage, and using Maul w/o a T&C proc was pretty much never happening.

The main point is that T&C seems to be balanced around having excessive amounts of rage at all times to be useful while actively tanking, which may have been designed with much better gear levels than many are able to obtain currently. I guarantee that 5.4 raid level gear will have Guardians being able to use T&C whenever they desire with how much rage will be generated, perhaps even on CD w/o T&C procs and not having to worry about enough rage to use active mitigation tools.

Overall, T&C may have accomplished the intent of reducing combo damage and giving Guardians more Maul usage, but it could be designed to be better. The main downfall I see with T&C is that no matter how much you stack it before getting hit, getting hit once for any amount of auto-attack damage removes all that hard effort and rage spent (aka, I don't like the choice of rage capping for extended periods of time to maximize T&C applications by not using Maul versus using Maul as a rage dump, as designed). The second biggest downfall of T&C, assuming the intent was to increase Guardian survivability to the level of other tanks, is that it increases the other tanks' survivability as well... while this synergy may seem good in general, I find it rather poor design for Guardians as a whole. Another downfall is that T&C likely sees more use when the Guardian isn't tanking at all (especially if rage generation needs while actively tanking are not met to use T&C on demand)... while they may not be as big, Guardians aren't likely reaping the benefits of their own damage reduction toolkit much of the time.

As is, T&C doesn't really make Guardians use Maul more, since the rage required to use T&C would prompt a druid to hit Maul anyways. In terms of preventing burst combo damage, a Guardian druid w/o rage generation to maintain SD/FR when using T&C on demand will not yield this benefit or end up taking more damage when trying to use T&C. Perhaps I'd like to see it extend to any source of physical damage the Guardian druid takes from the boss, which would allow even better defense against burst damage combos closer to other tanks w/o completely cloning them... but I can see potential tech problems involved with how it's currently implemented (heck, our combat logs can't even tell us with certainty how much damage T&C mitigates).

I did want to get into LotP and Innervate, but I fear my post is already pretty lengthy... another time!

from a healer PoV all non-shield tanks damage taken spikes insanely, none worse than dks and monks but druids are quite unstable as well.
If a prot paladin is tanking you can pretty safely spam your cheap slow heal and keep up your different hots and absorbs etc without any major spikes ever happening (unless the pala tank is bad) at the same boss and same time any non-shield tank can spike like a motherfucker and you constantly have to be on your toes and react-heal a lot more. Also feels like shield tanks have stronger personal cds, when I offspec tanked previous tier as a tankadin I could time up a 45% physical reduction 3sec duration (1-2 boss swings or 1 big hit) every 6-9 seconds and that was without a haste build which most tankadins use now. With 2 set T15 tankadins can have close to 100% up time on a huge block chance increase. Total damage taken might be the same (or close) between all tanks but I'd rather (as a OS healer now) heal a tank consistently for slightly more rather than having to hope that the druid/monk tank dodges or the dk manages to absorb/heal himself in time.

from a healer PoV all non-shield tanks damage taken spikes insanely, none worse than dks and monks but druids are quite unstable as well.
If a prot paladin is tanking you can pretty safely spam your cheap slow heal and keep up your different hots and absorbs etc without any major spikes ever happening (unless the pala tank is bad) at the same boss and same time any non-shield tank can spike like a motherfucker and you constantly have to be on your toes and react-heal a lot more.

Sounds very similar to the BC and early LK situation with Bears that caused them to get nerfed more times than I can count. Now the situation has completely reversed except this time nothing is being done about it.

Let's not forget this thread is about "Current state of Guardians". There is arguments on both sides and that is great, but I see people using the argument that is not the same for high level guilds and guilds just doing normal modes. I only do normal modes, we are a casual guild and only raid 2 days, which is perfect for me. The lead ask me if I would be willing to swap to my paladin to have a strong MT, I said no and he respected that. I won't loose my spot but it doesn't take away the fact that he notices the difference. People want the best or something close to the best be it; normal, heroic, or even lfr and as of now I do not even feel that we are middle of the pack.

If I had to rank tanks based on my observations (our second tank has a very rough schedule at work he misses many times, so we pug a lot) it would be: Pallies>Monks>DK/warr>Bears.
Pallies: Its been said here many times.
Monks: It has also been said here.
DK: more self healing on demand, DND, DG helps very useful for getting ads off healers.
Warr: more linear damage, not to many spikes, banners, raid wide cd, better mobility ( I think we are second to mobility, but not the best )
Bear: SD ( this is what I feel needs an overhaul, sorry but a chance to avoid damage is not good enough, when others can block, parry etc ) then we have FR which is good but not good enough when compared to say a dks self healing )

It is how I feel, I welcome you to disagree with me, but do not let your love for our beloved bears make you overlook how weak we are compared to others.

In my experience, Guardians have always been pretty spikey, especially against magic. At least now we have a way of dealing with it to an extent (Frenzied Regen) and making things somewhat easier on our healers. I think all the tanks (except maybe Paladins, which get pretty ridiculous when played correctly) are very close this expansion. It's not like any tanks are getting benched (at least not in normal); some may excel on a given fight, but overall it's pretty close. I think part of that is also due to encounter design in this expansion - a shift away from MT and OT to more of a co-tank setup.

Could things be better? Probably; I think we could use some work on our ranged pick-up abilities, but I am pretty happy with where we're at right now.

This has nothing to do with Guardians being "bad", and everything to do with Battle Healer being completely broken. Don't confuse the two.

I take bad and good in terms of tanking to be relative not to the content, but the other options available. Taken in this sense, the two are not confused, but intertwined. For the two to be separate, I would have to think of guardians in a vacuum. While fine for some, my practical circumstance of being one out of a potential five tanks doesn't allow this sort of thinking to prevail.

Just reading back, what I said might sound a little cryptic, so I'll try and add some clarity. There are two ways of thinking about this:
One regards whether or not any particular tank is good or bad, as in, can or cannot survive or "do well" in the current content. In this sense, it's not the case that druids are bad, and paladins good: druids are good, and paladins are also good, whereby good we mean pass can pass a certain survivability threshold suitable for tanking. The other sense however contrasts tanks more relatively, and measures less against a threshold of survivability, and more towards how each tank does when contrasted when another: This would dictate that guardians and warriors are bad, and paladins good.

An easier way to understand might be this: Is spec X damage acceptable in a raid environment when played correctly? Yes? Is it as good as spec Q? No? Then while surpassing a threshold of being good enough, it's not good compared to the no.1 spec.

For our purposes, it doesn't really matter where it's supposed to be - what matters is where it is on live, right now, during progress, while people are being rotated/rerolling etc. Even if bears aren't supposed to be as where they are, or paladins where they are - they are right now exactly where they are. The comparison is of where they are right now. We can talk of the differences given where both are supposed to be if you like, but the relevance of such a discussion might be questionable.

For our purposes, it doesn't really matter where it's supposed to be - what matters is where it is on live, right now, during progress, while people are being rotated/rerolling etc. Even if bears aren't supposed to be as where they are, or paladins where they are - they are right now exactly where they are. The comparison is of where they are right now. We can talk of the differences given where both are supposed to be if you like, but the relevance of such a discussion might be questionable.

I agree with you in that all that matters is where each class is currently at. I just don't think any of the tanks are so far behind (for normal modes) that it would warrant bringing one over another or re-rolling. The way I view it is like a bell curve: all five tanks are fairly equal on the average, but the potential for Paladins when played by exceptional players is greater than the maximum for the other four. Again, I don't think it's to the extent that bringing a non-Paladin tank is doing it wrong, as the gap between an exceptional Guardian and an exceptional Paladin aren't that great (at least when it comes to normal modes, which are all I have experience with in this tier so far).

For our purposes, it doesn't really matter where it's supposed to be - what matters is where it is on live, right now, during progress, while people are being rotated/rerolling etc.

No it doesn't. And I don't think you understand how this sort of development works. The only way changes happen to live is if they get hotfixed. Hotfixes only happen to bugs, or encounters that are not working as intended. Class mechanics are only changed with major patches.

Therefore in order to ask for any changes in an actual patch, we have to do one of two things:

1) Define actual problems as they exist on live. This must be specific, and not something that be simply handled by changing gear or how we play.
2) Look at 5.3 and attempt to predict performance in practical live scenarios - since nobody is going to raid T15 content on the PTR anyway. This is basically impossible.

Exo is the only person here that's managed to do #1. Everyone else buries their comments behind information that ranges from wrong to being completely irrelevant. I'm not here to take complaints because you (in the plural sense) can't be bothered to articulate a specific problem and identify potential solutions. If you want Guardians to "get better" (for lack of a better term) you (again plural) have to put more effort into explaining specific, identifiable, and replicable problems. Not only that, but you have to be prepared to defend your position and explain why existing solutions (if any are proposed) won't work.

I can't take random QQ'ing to Blizzard and ask for buffs. That's not the way this process works. And honestly, everyone here should know that by now.

Easy priority, not really squashy and fun to play. Why is Guardian not as populated? Most want to show off their gear, especially transmog stuff. With that being said, I'll side with bears over other tanks.

I was about to write a long and detailed post, arguing with you Arielle. But I think now I realise the problem: We could be talking at cross purposes. You say that "...in order to ask for any changes in an actual patch...". This might be your goal, but I haven't identified this, whereby this I mean "getting bears changed/buffed" as my goal.

My goal quite simply was to speak generally about my situation as I see it on the ground, and let off some steam in the process; not to get involved with the development and class balance cycle. If anyone wanted to be involved in that process, then your list of necessary conditions seems appropriate. In letting off this steam I made two claims:

I have claimed, a page back now, that our survivability while strong, by which I mean good, acceptable etc., is not guaranteed. By this I mean that specifically savage defense is not dead certain to decrease our damage taken in the way that when a paladin hits their shield of the righteous, that their shield of the righteous is. Some may regard this as a problem, and the degree of the problem, by which I mean seriousness, will vary depending upon content.

I have also claimed, again a page back, that our toolkit is lack lustre relative to other tanks, and I offer only general categories; ranged area of effect pick up, raid cool downs, and other specific abilities which negate specific boss mechanics; again whether or not this is problematic depends upon the content we’re facing.

Whether or not these are specific enough to effect a mechanics change, buff etc., is not my concern. My concern is to express myself with others that might be interested/care etc., and that may be able to either offer advice, consolation, etc. Again, given my situation, my raid team and the progression bosses I'm dealing with right now, what matters isn't where things should be, because where things should be doesn't kill the boss in front of me, or get me into the team instead of our tankadin.

Finally, I would stress caution in presuming that everyone does want to jump in on the development/class balance cycle by speaking or posting here, with what they take, be it articulated well or ill, as a problem with their bear.

I have claimed, a page back now, that our survivability while strong, by which I mean good, acceptable etc., is not guaranteed. By this I mean that specifically savage defense is not dead certain to decrease our damage taken in the way that when a paladin hits their shield of the righteous, that their shield of the righteous is. Some may regard this as a problem, and the degree of the problem, by which I mean seriousness, will vary depending upon content.

Right. Now to put this into context, you are referring to "Tank Combos". Regular tank damage (melee swings) has never been the problem in isolation. We are extremely good at regular melee swings. So really it's our inability to mitigate damage from "Tank Combos" that everyone is concerned about. The initial idea was to use T&C to entirely prevent or at least reduce the melee swing portion of these "Combos". However as Exo has described above there are mechanical issues with how T&C works that make this rather clunky. These make sense to me, and I'll do my best to bring them to Blizzard's attention.

So the question remains, are we expected to actually mitigate these "combos" or instead soak and heal them? The existence of the 2t15 and 4t15 bonuses seem to indicate the latter. It's up to us as Guardians in the community to figure out what the best approach is for this. Does this approach work? Why or why not? Based on what I've seen of heroic content (admittedly from a 10m perspective) it seems to be working as intended. I've heard anecdotal evidence that this approach is most certainly not working in 25m. But I haven't seen anything specific (backed by logs, etc.) yet.

I have also claimed, again a page back, that our toolkit is lack lustre relative to other tanks, and I offer only general categories; ranged area of effect pick up, raid cool downs, and other specific abilities which negate specific boss mechanics; again whether or not this is problematic depends upon the content we’re facing.

Some of these areas are reduced in severity simply by playing well (area pickup being the most obvious). Both Tranquility and HotW are very powerful when used correctly. I do agree that you have to plan ahead for these uses, instead of being able to use them re actively.

Obviously there are other pieces like Innervate and Leader of the Pack which are effectively useless and nobody would miss them if they suddenly disappeared from our spell book. Fixing those could significantly enhance the toolkit we bring to a raid. Is it "enough"? I don't know. But I feel like it's a good place to start.

I'm clearly open to other suggestions. But I'm not open to knee-jerk buffs without any justification beyond "Cuz Paladins".

The "cuz Paladins" makes me smile. In fact I actually laughed out loud.

Regarding the first problem, I've not been benched due to these sort of issues. In fact on Sha of Fear hc, I was taken along with the paladin above the choice of every other tank. The reason being I suppose was that having on demand 70%+ dodge provides chance enough of dodging swings. Moreover tooth and claw was an excellent tool for mitigating the first swing of Dread Thrash that we didn't dodge. The rub here is that although the Sha of Fear the swings were all separate, they occured in effect simultaneously.

Thus, what did happen at times was that despite your dodge chance, each of the thrashes just so happens to hit. This is unproblematic for the paladin; shield of the righteous guarantees the x% reduction. And as for mitigation or soaking, I fear that it will nearly always be preferable to mitigate rather than soak since mitigation is usually less threatening to the survival of the tank. A tank with predictable mitigation is easier to heal and keep topped than the dodge dodge splat that can be the case with druids. There is of course a threshold of mitigation required for mitigation to trump soaking and healing before the mitigation model becomes preferable.

Another example (if we exclude the shield mechanic) would be Tortoss HC where I will dodge most of the bites, but spike when I do not, but where the paladin just guarantees survival, unless of course the raid was pretty much about to wipe anyway. Luckily those snapping bites have never killed me, but I know the healers are less likely to panic with the paladin in place. I suppose there's similar thinking behind an argument between a disc priest and a resto druid: why would you heal up, when you could just never take the damage in the first place? The entire model of mitigation is in abstract outright preferable.

Now the second problem. It's true that playing better solves many problems. I'm actually writing this while my guild progresses on 10man Meg HC. Tonight, they've gone with the Paladin and DK tank. Why? Well, Hand of Purity is one talent which given its 30 second cd, and 10% damage reduction, and 70% reduction on dot damage, makes certain parts of the fight much easier. Why else? The adds just outright run to the Paladin if he heals with righteous fury active. Why else? Because glyph of the battle healer makes healing the enrages much easier. I could use NV + Incarnation, that's true. I could mix and match NV + Beserk too, which is what I was doing on the heads when in attempts last week. But that's a total of 1 minute our of every 3, where as his healing is permanent. This is of course provided I'm not asked to take HoTW, which while excellent for 45 seconds, is minimal the rest of the fight.

I'm not for a moment suggesting the fight cannot be done with a bear. Of course it can. But I do wonder why a guild would take a bear above a paladin for that fight, and for many fights at the moment, given the toolkits in play.

One more for you Arielle: I think a part of me having higher blood pressure than I should is down to not knowing on every dread thrash how many of few thrashes I would survive!

Edit: As is now indicated in the post directly below - its the large undodged hits which are problematic.

Right. Now to put this into context, you are referring to "Tank Combos". Regular tank damage (melee swings) has never been the problem in isolation. We are extremely good at regular melee swings. So really it's our inability to mitigate damage from "Tank Combos" that everyone is concerned about. The initial idea was to use T&C to entirely prevent or at least reduce the melee swing portion of these "Combos". However as Exo has described above there are mechanical issues with how T&C works that make this rather clunky. These make sense to me, and I'll do my best to bring them to Blizzard's attention.

So the question remains, are we expected to actually mitigate these "combos" or instead soak and heal them? The existence of the 2t15 and 4t15 bonuses seem to indicate the latter. It's up to us as Guardians in the community to figure out what the best approach is for this. Does this approach work? Why or why not? Based on what I've seen of heroic content (admittedly from a 10m perspective) it seems to be working as intended. I've heard anecdotal evidence that this approach is most certainly not working in 25m. But I haven't seen anything specific (backed by logs, etc.) yet.

Some of these areas are reduced in severity simply by playing well (area pickup being the most obvious). Both Tranquility and HotW are very powerful when used correctly. I do agree that you have to plan ahead for these uses, instead of being able to use them re actively.

Obviously there are other pieces like Innervate and Leader of the Pack which are effectively useless and nobody would miss them if they suddenly disappeared from our spell book. Fixing those could significantly enhance the toolkit we bring to a raid. Is it "enough"? I don't know. But I feel like it's a good place to start.

I'm clearly open to other suggestions. But I'm not open to knee-jerk buffs without any justification beyond "Cuz Paladins".

I don't see how we are anywhere as good as you imply for melee attacks. The undisputed autoattack king of this tier is Ra-den. Here are a couple of swings I took with no cooldowns up on my monk at all nearing the p2 transition:

Working backwards through 25% passive stance reduction and 30% armor, the unmitigated damage per swing is 1.75 million. Lets say a bear comes along with 12% passive redux and 70% armor, those lines would look like:

Ra-den hits Bear for 462,000
Ra-den hits Bear for 463,000

Now, I was somewhat lucky in that those two swings didn't occur back to back (hooray for 60% avoidance) but even if they did, my monk has 800k hp and would've been left at ~10%. What druid has a base hp of 1 million to say the same? Of course, that would look even worse on a blood dk, which is probably why Rignaros ditched his DK for his monk on this fight. (No, cooldowns weren't used here because his damage is still ramping up and this was just halfway through the fight before he got more +damage stacks.)

My paladin partner and I two-tanked the fight, and melee attempts were spread very evenly. I took 142 swings, 56 of which connected for an average damage per swing of 260k. The paladin took 139 swings, 87 which connected, but his average damage taken per swing was roughly 180k. If I geared my druid up and took him in for this dude, I'd likely take roughly 60 of 140 swings as well, but for an average damage per swing of 340-350k.

I went through the expression editor and looked up Ra-den's physical attacks, and I saw only one attack that ever went above 270k on the paladin (a 490k swing, so SoTR was probably down and it indeed resulted in his death not two seconds later.)

-----

I'm not sure I'm getting through to you, but in general, avoidance tanking sucks. Savage defense is a great tool averaged over the course of time, but when we're talking about stuff that can actually kill you, bears suffer from being so rng-able. This wouldn't be so bad if bears are able to mitigate the incoming damage consistently, say with blood shield (although dks are also fairly terrible for this), or with stagger, but that's just the thing - aside from DKs (who need help as well but that's another story), bears easily take the most damage per melee swing of all tanks given proper play, and by a very wide margin, which completely baffles me because their design has historically been a big meat shield and not a nimble rogue that gets splatted when two consecutive autoattack swings connect back to back, which is what would happen here.

-----

Ok, so lets ignore the physical swings because bear is rngable. Lets talk about magic damage. Here's a decent example of magic mitigation from me on our farm kill of dark animus (25H) yesterday, edited a little for brevity:

In total, I took under 200k damage for all 8 explosive slams added together (I took 11 for our first kill but we've gotten more gear). Tell me how a bear can even come close to this?

I'm not submitting ideas for the developers to implement, I wouldn't be posting this on these forums if that were my intention. I trust blizzard developers, just reading their posts and blogs I can tell that they are intelligent, and already know of these issues. I just happened to come across someone asking a question regarding a point I made on another venue and there is room for me to properly clarify my position. I don't really care if they buff the bear or not. If they do, great. If they don't, whatever, I've swapped my main class a half dozen times already for whatever's the best at any given time, I won't cry about not being able to stick with my druid.

Regarding a solution to the RNG-able element of bears, I have two, one of which is a much quicker but less elegant fix than the other:

1) Nerf the dodge on savage defense, and add a passive X% damage reduction. Alternately, wildly buff bear armour. Either way, swap the mitigation into something which guarantees the reduction rather than dice rolls.

2) This is my preferred suggestion, though it might be completely unfeasible. Break each boss hit down into smaller hits, specifically for bears. Imagine a boss auto attack which hits for 200k. Current mechanics are that the bear would either dodge and take nothing, or would take the 200k. Likewise, any other tank either takes the 200k, or operates on some sort of mitigation mechanic. Instead, what if bears had that attack broken down into 5, or 10 smaller attacks, each at 40 or 20k respectively. Then each 20k attack is given an independent chance to hit the bear, at the relevant dodge ratio. Thus, rather than a decision about 200k, we have a decision about 10 separate but simultaneous instances of 20k. This would allow for the RNG of bears to be FAR less severe. Of course, it could still just so happen that all 10 instances of the 20k hit - but far far less likely. In fact, they'd probably need to nerf savage defense if implementing this idea.

I'm not sure I'm getting through to you, but in general, avoidance tanking sucks. Savage defense is a great tool averaged over the course of time, but when we're talking about stuff that can actually kill you, bears suffer from being so rng-able. This wouldn't be so bad if bears are able to mitigate the incoming damage consistently, say with blood shield (although dks are also fairly terrible for this), or with stagger, but that's just the thing - aside from DKs (who need help as well but that's another story), bears easily take the most damage per melee swing of all tanks given proper play, and by a very wide margin, which completely baffles me because their design has historically been a big meat shield and not a nimble rogue that gets splatted when two consecutive autoattack swings connect back to back, which is what would happen here.

You've provided a great analysis here for sure. What I don't understand is why you decided to completely exclude both T&C and the 2pc bonus from it. Savage defense on its own isn't going to save you. Whether or not it's supposed to is not a question we know the answer to. However I suspect the answer is a pretty big "No".

What's the auto attack speed of Ra-Den anyway?

In total, I took under 200k damage for all 8 explosive slams added together (I took 11 for our first kill but we've gotten more gear). Tell me how a bear can even come close to this?

We wouldn't, which for all we know is the point. However we can assure that we have enough EH to survive the hit and then instantly heal it all back.

2) This is my preferred suggestion, though it might be completely unfeasible. Break each boss hit down into smaller hits, specifically for bears. Imagine a boss auto attack which hits for 200k. Current mechanics are that the bear would either dodge and take nothing, or would take the 200k. Likewise, any other tank either takes the 200k, or operates on some sort of mitigation mechanic. Instead, what if bears had that attack broken down into 5, or 10 smaller attacks, each at 40 or 20k respectively. Then each 20k attack is given an independent chance to hit the bear, at the relevant dodge ratio. Thus, rather than a decision about 200k, we have a decision about 10 separate but simultaneous instances of 20k. This would allow for the RNG of bears to be FAR less severe. Of course, it could still just so happen that all 10 instances of the 20k hit - but far far less likely. In fact, they'd probably need to nerf savage defense if implementing this idea.

This sounds like a ridiculously cool idea.

Edit: Let's take that suggestion a bit further.

Instead of our Mastery being a flat armor increase (which, let's face it, is incredibly boring), what if it powered this "partitioning" mechanic? For example, Mastery could increase the amount of damage that is subject to "partitioning" (like Stagger), or decrease the size of each "partition" which would create Mastery breakpoints.

I think part of that is also due to encounter design in this expansion - a shift away from MT and OT to more of a co-tank setup.

This is where I feel that the real problem lies! The encounter design is for co-tanks. Guardian druids are outdated in that regard, and are made for off tanking.
The problem with Guardians is not the number tuning. The tuning is done really well and is balanced with other tanks (not pallies). The issue is, that Guardians have a very limited toolkit and have trouble dealing with a lot of existing mechanics.
Yes, druids are perfectly viable to take for hardcore progression (paragon for example), if the second tank is a paladin or some other "can do everything quite good" tank like monk. The issue with Guardians is that they will ALWAYS get to do the easy job on a fight. The "off-tank's" job.

Some examples:
Heroic Horridon.
A druid is probably the worst kind of tank I can imagine for this. The combination of Dire Call, Triple Puncture, and two melee hits will just crush a Guardian. The active mitigation, which guardians have, is quite useless; your maul will maybe absorb half a melee hit. The rest is still perfectly able to kill you. The only way that a guardian would consistently be able to survive that kind of abuse, is with the use of personal or external cooldowns. This requires a whole lot more work for your team. What can you do about this? Oh right... have another tank tanking the boss and BoP his stacks off, while the Guardian does the easy job of tanking the adds.

Tortos.
Bats.............
Oh you did not dodge these 3 hits... well too bad, we will eat you now. Maul is useless on this even. Yes you can keep up savage defence 100% of the time while tanking the bats - It will still be a whole lot more spiky. What do you do? Ahhh... you make the guardian tank tortos himself! Also you hope to hell that the healers are on the ball, as he will be taking 70% of his hp in damage because of bites. A guardian may be able to heal a lot of that back up, but I tell you - it is not fun to heal! Healing a guardian just feels so inconsistent, and it eats a lot more of your mana.

Also Heroic Sha
What would you do with a guardian? Apply a maul before (dread) trash and use savage defence. Then you hope to not get killed! Or.... you just make the guardian taunt for each naked and afraid while your other tank handles the difficult stuff?!

Short: A great guardian druid will not hold you back, if your second tank is one who can block (or stagger or whatever).